[Commentary]

The author—may Allah have mercy on him—has cited several hadiths explaining good character, and showing that those who will sit closest to the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, are the people of the finest conduct. The better your manners are, the nearer you will be to Allah and to His Messenger compared with others. Conversely, the furthest in rank from the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, are the verbose, the bombastic, and the grandiloquent.

The verbose are those who speak at great length and wrest the gathering away from others. When such a person sits in an assembly, he takes over the conversation as though no one else were present; he talks continuously and gives no one else a chance to speak. This is undoubtedly a form of arrogance. Yet if the people in the gathering delegate him and say, “Give us some advice, offer us an admonition,” and he then speaks, there is no harm in that. The blameworthy case is ordinary conversation in which a person dominates the gathering and allows no one else to speak—so much so that some attendees would like to say something but are unable, fearing interruption from the man who has seized the session with his words.

Likewise are the bombastic. A bombastic person is one who speaks with his mouth full, acting as though he were the most eloquent Arab, inflating himself and strutting in speech. An example is someone who addresses the general public in classical Arabic. The common folk do not understand formal Arabic; if you speak to them in it, they will consider that bombastic and pretentious. If, however, you are teaching students, you should indeed speak in classical Arabic so that they become accustomed to it and learn to pronounce it correctly. But with laypeople who are unfamiliar with it, you should not address them in that register; rather, speak to them in the language they know, and do not use rare expressions—that is, do not introduce obscure words that confuse them—for that too is